The Devil’s Defense Attorney

Reading Rod Dreher’s piece on NPR, in which he hypothesizes the kind of show he’d love to listen to regularly, I was struck with inspiration. You know what I would listen to?

The Devil’s Defense Attorney.

An absurd proportion of our discourse today is devoted to outrage porn (Dreher has been known to indulge in this himself). You read a news story that sounds outrageous, you declare yourself outraged, and you proceed to suck your thumb about how the significance of this new outage. It’s a reliable business model, the perfect match for the other reliable business model, smarm.

This is a bi-partisan pastime; the outrage could be the latest excrescence from the fever swamps of the right or the eye-rollingest drivel from some left-wing fruit loop – or, for that matter, the purest expression of Friedman-Gladwell conventional (as in convention center) wisdom.

So here’s my show format: every week (or, heck, every day), the producers scour the internet for the most outrageous story – and build a show around defending the apparently indefensible.

You’d have to be assiduous about being fair-minded, picking things that outrage right and left, sensible center and radical center. And, because the same host would have to argue from wildly different premises each week (or day), she couldn’t promote a specific ideology. Rather, she’d merely have to make the case that a defense existed out there, one that was deserving of some degree of respect even if it wasn’t endorsed.

Would the show always succeed in convincing people of that defense? I hope not – some outrages are genuinely outrageous, and even among those that aren’t there are plenty of non-outrages that are nonetheless simply wrong. But maybe, just maybe, it would force those who profit by outrage to reckon with the possibility that, before the week was out, they would be obliterated by the devil’s defense attorney, and would therefore be forced to, you know, make actual arguments – and, more to the point, present the facts in something more closely resembling a neutral manner.

That’s a utopian hope, perhaps. But hey, if it had no effect on the discourse, then it would never run out of material. So as a business proposition . . .

I like it, but would emphasize a slightly different slant: rather than defending the outrageous, the end goal could be dissolving the outrage through wisdom. This would involve considering ‘defenses’ dialectically, but the test at the end of the show would be: are you still outraged? For it may be that to the wise man, nothing is outrageous.

Listen to Jay Noah, you gotta pitch it. If you had time you could guest host, wouldn’t that be a trip!

I barely ever listen to NPR because of the lack of balanced listening and frankly a lot of it is quite boring, but this would be awesome. Or even Rod’s suggestion would be awesome as well. Something to get you fired up and thinking.

Speaking of which, I highly recommend Timothy Findlay’s “Not Wanted on the Voyage”. It is a reimagining of the Noah story – with the author effectively serving as Lucifer’s defence counsel. Pullman’s God is a faint echo of Findlay’s Yahweh; and I have not yet come across a better anti-Milton Lucifer.

“she’d merely have to make the case that a defense existed out there,”

The only fly in this particular ointment is that much of liberal outrage porn has at its root the very premise that underlies your proposition: there is no absolute Truth; all things being relative, everything is open to defence; everything being open to defence, none ought to offend. They just take it to the a level (not tolerating the intolerant) that takes the game to the field played on by conservatives (not tolerating the intolerable), thus opening themselves to (mostly faux) outrage.

I read Salon as my mental antidote to Dreher – put them side by side, and you get your program 🙂 … I used to read Rogin and Lake as mental corrections to Larison, but it was unfair in some sense: Larison is far less susceptible to outrage than Dreher, and Rogin and Lake are caricatures of hawkish reporting.

Finally, as a lawyer and a debater before that, I am used to seeing “the other side” – in fact, the most effective debaters and lawyers first get into the heads of the Devil before proposing to defend the Angel sitting in the dock. I think that the challenge is not so much arguing the merits of the other side, but rather, doing so from within your own ideological framework: if Dreher could manage to support gay marriage outrages from within his construct, or I could manage to defend Phelps from within mine. Now, that would be true mental dexterity 🙂 …

Apologies for the multiple posts, but speaking of Dreher and outrage porn and so on, here is the first entry into your Devil’s Defense Attorney project. Let’s see if there are any defenders:

At first, Satan got a toehold on life in the 1920′s with the Scopes Monkey Trial (evolution can be taught alongside creation). Eventually, of course, this toehold became a stronghold to where creation can no longer be taught at all. And the result, 1973′s Roe v. Wade. Without a Creator we now become the determiners of life instead of God.

icarus, considering that the majority of zygotes fail to turn into bouncing babies through ordinary failure-to-implant, miscarriages, etc. rather than due to abortion it looks to me that the Benham brothers don’t understand that much about female reproduction.

“Speak of the Devil and he doth appear” seems to me the most sensible approach to the subject.

Mr. Millman’s proposal carries a strong scent of hipster irony. He hedges by declaring that “there are plenty of non-outrages that are nonetheless simply wrong”. In doing so, hasn’t he (in the space of fewer that 300 words) already travelled the full circle of this non-argument.

The movie director Sam Peckinpah reputedly said of his project “The Wild Bunch” that he wanted to make a movie so violent no one would want to make a violent movie again. Most of know where that’s gotten us.

Brilliant idea, but to do it justice, it would have to be a weekly program, to build in time to give it the full “RadioLab” treatment and really engage the issues and their implications and dig in. Sometimes, outrage porn is best countered with a careful “oh brother” and taking the outrage seriously on its own terms and extending it to demonstrate either its selectivity or unsustainability. But other times, outrage porn is best countered by investigating the facts of the case, which almost never actually accord with the account that generates the outrage.